incremental backup slow, too big; how can I view incremental backup contents?

I am a new user of TrueImage 8.0 on a Win XP machine. I have 2 HDs and am backing up the smaller (80GB, which is almost full) to the larger (120 GB). Both are internal drives.

TrueImage took 6 or 8 hours to create the initial full image, with standard default settings in TrueImage. That seemed kind of slow to me, but OK. The new image mounts fine.

Now as a test I've done an incremental backup immediately after a full backup finished. I didn't create any new files in between, and it took a full hour to do the incremental backup. Why should it take an hour to back up so little? (The only changed files presumably would be system files of some sort that Windows changes without my knowing it.)

Also, the incremental backup (which should be small, because no files were changed) is 500 megabytes in size. Why is it so big?

I haven't changed any setup parameters; I think TrueImage defaults to exclude temporary files that might be taking up space, right?

I'd like to check to see what the files in the 500 MB incremental backup are. But I can't, because when I mount the image, it displays all of the files backed up in the whole image, not just the incremental backup. Is there a way to view just the files copied during an incremental backup?

Thanks to you experienced users who can help me!

 

Phew! 6 to 8 hours is crazy. Something is definitely wrong somewhere.

It takes me approx 3 minutes to backup nearly 7GB of my 80GB active partition. Therefore, by my reckoning, a full 80GB of data should take me no more than 40 minutes.

Are your drives definitely running in DMA mode? Also, if not already so configured, it can help if the drives are connected as "master" on separate controller channels with any optical drives connected as "slaves".

Regards

 

Hello brophyl_2000,

Thank you for using Acronis True Image (http://www.acronis.com/products/trueimage/).

Acronis True Image backups sectors not files. When it creates an incremental backup it compares the check sums of the sectors in the created full image (and the existing incremental images) and on the disk. If the check sums are different then it includes this sector into incremental image.

Please contact support@acronis.com regarding this problem and provide us with the following information:
1) The full model name of the HDD controller installed on your motherboard and the full model name of the motherboard.
2) The cluster size of your smaller hard disk drive.
3) Please download Acronis Report utility available at http://www.acronis.com/files/support/AcronisReport.exe and run it, create a report and send it to us.

Thank you.

--
Best regards,
Andrew Berezovsky